Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Although similar to his previous efforts in Paris, Marx’s activities in Brussels proved more intense and conflict-laden. As he endeavored to shape the political program and revolutionary orientation of the chief German émigré secret society, he clashed with other prospective leaders of the nascent labor movement. Marx’s theoretical development emerged out of his angry and sarcastic critiques of Young Hegelian and socialist intellectuals. When these criticisms became public, they heightened personal and political antagonisms, arousing controversy, and creating both more loyal followers and more embittered enemies. These growing controversies intersected with Marx’s family life, particularly in the ever sensitive area of his finances, so that it became even harder to raise money and to make ends meet. His persistent financial difficulties, sharpened by the economic crisis Europe experienced in the years 1845–47, increased Marx’s personal irascibility, heightening the polemical in his political and intellectual endeavors, which in turn created yet more problems for him. By 1847, both the broader European political situation and Marx’s personal circumstances were in crisis mode.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1845, Marx, along with Engels, who had joined him in Brussels, took a trip to England, while Jenny, pregnant with a second child, visited her mother in Trier.4 The journey was primarily to do research for the planned critique of political economy, and most of it was spent in Manchester. Which aspects of the bourgeois dreams and capitalist nightmares of the city Engels showed his friend is unknown. What we do know is that both men sat together in Manchester’s public libraries, studying the works of English political economists. Marx’s wide reading included seventeenth-century pioneers of political economy, William Petty and Charles Davenant, but also his own contemporaries, such as John Stuart Mill, whose assertions about international trade Marx described in his notes as “beautiful nonsense.”5

  On the way back to Brussels, the two men stopped for a couple of weeks in London, where Engels introduced Marx to English and German radicals he had met during the year he was working in Manchester. The Germans were members of the League of the Just, the main exile German secret society, composed of several hundred radical journeymen artisans and a few more intellectual leaders. The members, both working-class and more educated, veered between a Jacobin radicalism akin to the ideals of Robespierre and variations on the socialism prevalent in Paris. Marx had associated with this group while he was in Paris, but its most resolute leaders and activists had been implicated in the attempted French republican uprising of 1839 and had fled the country, settling in London, where they enjoyed the very liberal British policy on granting political asylum. In London, the radical leaders organized a new branch of the secret society, which by the mid-1840s had become its largest and most active, and harbored the group’s European-wide central committee. They also created, to facilitate its activities and recruit new members, a German Workers’ Educational Association. In contrast to the secret society, the association was an open public group, a flourishing enterprise that had seven hundred members at its peak, offering them opportunities for socializing, recreation, adult education, and a mutual benefits fund to help support them during periods of ill health or unemployment.6

  These artisan associations were run by a troika of German leaders. Two were themselves craftsmen, the shoemaker Heinrich Bauer and the watchmaker Joseph Moll, a Cologne native. The third, dominant figure among them was Karl Schapper, an example of a quite different social type that had come into existence in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century: the professional revolutionary. First involved in radical politics as a student at the University of Giessen at the beginning of the 1830s, Schapper participated in three different failed conspiracies and revolutionary putsches in Germany, Switzerland, and France between 1833 and 1839, the last of which brought him into London exile. Tall and powerfully built, with a prominent dark mustache, Schapper looked the part of a man of action. He lived for his political agitation, spending hours in pubs with artisans calling for revolution, and, when legally possible, using his accomplished oratory in public meetings to demand the same.7

  Countless twentieth-century Marxist activists, including Lenin, eagerly adopted the hallmarks of the professional revolutionary, continuous single-minded conspiracy and agitation, but Marx never did. Neither Marx’s professorial demeanor, nor his scholarly interests, nor his family commitments and the financial demands they made upon him fit these requirements. His encounter with such a revolutionary, though, would provide him with a crucial link to the social group he had designated as central to his political aspirations.

  Schapper’s political connections went well beyond the ranks of German artisans. He had ties to Giuseppe Mazzini, Europe’s leading democratic radical and tireless organizer of clandestine subversive groups. Schapper also worked closely with émigré French radicals. The membership of the Workers’ Educational Association he led, while mostly German, had a scattering of other nationalities, including Scandinavians, Dutch, Swiss, Italians, and a “genuine Turk,” a Muslim from one of the Bulgarian provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps the most important connections were with English radicals, the Chartists, who combined the demand for a democratic government in Britain, to be guaranteed by a “people’s charter,” with labor agitation containing at least some socialist elements. Either directly through Schapper, or via Engels, Marx met a number of these radicals in London, including Ernest Jones, who would become a long-term political ally.

  The English radicals were interested in uniting the leftists of different European countries, or at least the émigré leftists from different countries residing in London, an idea Karl Schapper strongly endorsed. During their stay in London, Marx and Engels were part of the preliminary preparations, although the actual founding of the “Fraternal Democrats” only occurred in September 1845, after they had returned to Belgium. Marx’s political activities would focus on the German radicals of the League of the Just and the English radicals leading the Fraternal Democrats in the two years after his trip to England.8

  SOMETIME EARLY IN 1846, Marx and Engels decided to create a network of communists across Europe, by founding a Communist Committee of Correspondence. From the group’s central office in Brussels, they would send out circulars and reports on communist theory and political economy, while their correspondents in the German states and elsewhere on the Continent would send them information about activities in their localities. If their network contained primarily German-speaking communists, they also made efforts to internationalize it, calling on their English connections and attempting to recruit Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of Paris’s most prominent socialist thinkers, and a personal acquaintance of Marx.

  The whole endeavor was for the purpose of preparing a congress, at which delegates could meet and devise a political program. Sometimes the proposed congress was described as a communist one, and at other times as democratic—not necessarily a distinction, since Engels publicly proclaimed communism to be the contemporary form of democracy. It was not entirely clear if the congress participants would be just Germans, or if it would include representatives from different European nations. As the Fraternal Democrats were drawn into the plan and began to provide its organizational backbone, which was certainly the case by 1847, the congress became more explicitly international and democratic in orientation.9

  The organizing attempts of the Committee of Correspondence were unsuccessful; its efforts never reached beyond the circle of Marx’s personal acquaintances. There was occasional correspondence with communists in Germany, but the general tenor of their reports was discouraging: supporters were scarce; they lacked money to support the enterprise; and they found it poorly designed and badly implemented. As for the circulars to be issued from Brussels dealing with theoretical and economic questions, only one ever appeared: an attack on Hermann Kriege, an émigré German communist living in New York. The tone of denunciation in the circular was so vehement that Marx and Engels’s correspondents, who agreed with the pol
itical point they were making, found their way of doing so positively offputting in its extreme hostility.10

  For all the problems with Marx and Engel’s organizing efforts, interest in socialism and communism was growing in Germany, particularly in the western provinces of the Prussian monarchy, where a number of periodicals devoted to communist ideas appeared in the mid-1840s: in their native Rhine Province, the Mirror of Society and the Rhenish Yearbooks of Social Reform; in the neighboring province of Westphalia, the more colorfully named Westphalian Steamboat. Both Marx and Engels wrote occasional pieces for these journals, but they aspired to have their own, under their individual control, and, like the Franco-German Yearbooks, published abroad, outside the reach of press censorship. They envisaged this journal as just one product of a publishing company that would also bring out a library of German translations of the works of French and English socialists.11

  These plans were not solely the work of Marx and Engels. Behind them was a third, Moses Hess, who had moved to Brussels in the fall of 1845 with his female companion, and lodged next door to the Marxes. Each of the trio had associations with the other two directly. Engels, for instance, had met Hess a good year before his encounter with Marx in Paris; the Mirror of Society had begun as a collaboration between Engels and Hess, without Marx’s involvement. “The triumvirate, Marx, Hess and Engels,” as the anti-communist German democrat Karl Heinzen described them, formed a working group of three equal partners. Letters from German radicals such as Hermann Ewerbeck and Karl Ludwig Bernays in Paris, or Wilhelm Weitling and Georg Weerth in England, were addressed to them jointly, perceiving them as part of a common enterprise. Ewerbeck noted in one letter that “I always write for all of you.”12

  Hess was crucial to the publishing plans because he was quite accomplished at getting journals started and works published. Both Rhenish socialist periodicals were originally his doing. It was Hess who negotiated with two pro-communist Westphalian capitalists, Julius Meyer, owner of an iron forge, and Rudolph Rempel, a linen wholesaler, both of whom had supported the Westphalian Steamboat, about financing the proposed new publications. An agreement seemed to have been reached, but the whole enterprise collapsed in June 1846. It is hard to know exactly what happened, but Hess’s own account noted that the crucial agreements between him and Meyer and Rempel were purely verbal, so it is likely that all the parties were hearing what they wanted—and, given Hess’s tendency to conflate his aspirations with reality, the outcome was no surprise.13

  Marx could not contain his anger when the project collapsed. His Cologne friends attributed what was probably a severe case of bronchitis to his agitation and frustration. Rising from his sickbed, Marx wrote an outraged letter to Meyer and Rempel, denouncing them for violating their contractual obligations—taking at face value Hess’s assertions. The two Westphalians replied in equally angry terms, and the story of the falling out, which quickly became known in leftist circles, reflected poorly on Marx, alienating some of his friends and associates. Explaining the attitudes of German radicals in Paris, Hermann Ewerbeck informed Marx: “The ‘party’ is kaput in the esteem of the people.”14

  Marx continued to look for a publisher, but the printers he approached were either afraid of the Prussian authorities or skeptical of the series as a business venture, two often related issues. By 1847, he was pursuing another project: a journal of political economy, to be funded by selling shares of stock, along the lines of the Rhineland News. Marx was still courting potential investors when the outbreak of the 1848 Revolution gave him the opportunity for more direct forms of political action.15

  In view of the effort Marx put into these publishing projects, and the anger he showed when they were thwarted, he must have attached a good deal of importance to them. These potential publications, quite unlike his association with the radical émigré artisans of the League of the Just, were directed toward an educated and affluent audience. Even before he moved to Brussels, Marx had perceived the proletariat as the social group that would be the key to his increasingly revolutionary aspirations. The centrality of the working class and its importance for his theories would only increase and be more elaborately justified during his time in Brussels. Yet for all his commitment to the working class, he continued to pursue his associations with the bourgeoisie. Both of these trends would be very apparent in the major theoretical works Marx authored or co-authored in the years 1845–47.

  THREE SUBSTANTIAL WORKS OF philosophy and social and economic theory are associated with Marx’s time in Brussels: The Holy Family, The German Ideology, and The Poverty of Philosophy. Commentaries on them tend to portray a straight path, leading directly from Marx’s initial and tentative attempts at articulating communist ideas in Paris to the Brussels works and on to the well-formulated and trenchantly expressed positions of the Communist Manifesto. A straight line certainly can be drawn through Marx’s Brussels writings, but only by neglecting a substantial majority of their actual content, which encompassed a meandering mass of polemics, denouncing with a wide variety of sharp arguments ranging from trenchant to dubious the Young Hegelian intellectuals and other communist thinkers. All too often, the polemics became an end in themselves; at other points, they were a form of veiled self-criticism, in which Marx furthered his own theoretical development by denouncing other people’s expressions of ideas that he himself had previously held.

  The first of the three works was in fact written in Paris, and in the hands of the publisher by December 1844, but appeared in print shortly after Marx’s arrival in Brussels. Officially jointly authored with Engels, Marx had written all but the first few chapters.16 The book’s witty yet ponderous title, The Holy Family. Or, the Critique of Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and His Associates, indicated its main thrust against those Young Hegelians who supported a lifestyle-based radicalism, emphasizing the criticism of revealed religion. The work took the form of hostile commentaries on articles appearing in the General Literary News, a journal Bauer and his supporters had established in Berlin that lasted about a year until its suppression by the Prussian authorities.

  Marx and Engels certainly found a lot to criticize in the articles, making derisive remarks about the authors’ inability to translate English or French phrases into German correctly, their excessive use of modifiers, their misunderstandings of the eighteenth-century French materialists or the political dynamics of the French Revolution. The widely varied polemics went on at some length, with Marx, to take just one example, denouncing Bauer’s writings on the Jewish Question three different times, without saying substantially more than he had in his own article on the topic in the Franco-German Yearbooks. The impression of scattershot criticism and excessive, at times obsessive, detail was one that Marx’s own friends had on reading the work.17

  The book was widely reviewed in German literary journals; the reviewers agreed that the authors were followers of Ludwig Feuerbach. They generally did not pick up on the nuances: that Marx was projecting his politicized, labor-oriented version of Feuerbach’s ideas. The Holy Family contained a few passages on labor in capitalism as an example of human self-alienation that summed up, very briefly, themes discussed at great length in the unpublished Paris manuscripts. Marx, describing himself as an advocate of Feuerbach’s “real humanism,” denounced Bauer’s “speculative idealism,” his understanding of political, social, or economic conditions, as representing the development of the idea, or human self-consciousness, rather than seeing human material conditions expressed in political struggles and social and economic structures. After making this point in referring to the French Revolution and socialism, Marx expanded it. Following Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit as a version of religious self-alienation, Marx described Bauer’s attribution of the driving force in human history to self-consciousness as a version of religion—or, as he sarcastically remarked, “The religious savior of the world is finally realized in the critical savior of the world, Herr Bauer.”18

  This w
as meant to sting, since Bauer was proud of his atheism. Marx heightened the criticism by denouncing Bauer’s ideas as “Christian-Germanic,” putting Bauer in the same camp as the born-again Christian conservatives of Prussia’s Friedrich Wilhelm IV and his followers—the very people who had torpedoed Bauer’s academic career. To describe Bauer’s ideas as fundamentally similar to theirs was an unfair criticism, made with the intent of tarring someone politically on the left—albeit in ways with which Marx strongly, and not unjustifiably, disagreed—with doctrines of conservatism. In his polemics of the period, Marx repeatedly made use of this tactic.

  The Holy Family, reflecting its Parisian origins, was strikingly francophile. The portrayal of the French Revolution as a triumph of the bourgeoisie over the nobility and the onset of a capitalist social and economic system—an idea that French socialists and radicals and even liberals and moderates had repeatedly brought forward—was central to Marx’s view of politics and to his criticism of the Young Hegelians. Marx’s invidious comparison of the Young Hegelians’ speculative juggling of economic concepts with the French socialists’ investigations of the nature of property, value, and wage labor pointed to his preference for French theorizing. Marx even described Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s What Is Property?, with its celebrated assertion that “Property is theft,” as the contemporary equivalent of the abbé Sièyes’s What Is the Third Estate?, one of the seminal documents of the French Revolution of 1789.19 This comparison was an early version of one of Marx’s fundamental political concepts: the parallels between a future socialist revolution, in which workers would overthrow the reign of the bourgeoisie, and the French Revolution, when the bourgeoisie ended the rule of the feudal nobility.